The OpenDSA eTextbook project has received a grant from the NSFIUSE program.

The award goes to Co-PIs Cliff Shaffer and Jeremy Ernst of Virginia Tech, Susan Rodger of Duke University, and Tom Naps of University of Wisconsin— Oshkosh. The total funding for the three-year grant is $998,402.

The grant will support efforts to expand the content, improve the infrastructure, and disseminate project materials. Key objectives of the project include:

Integrate the popular JFLAP sytem for Formal Languges into the OpenDSA framework. This will involve a rewrite to JFLAP into HTML5.

Create visualizations and content to support topics in Programming Languages.

Develop materials for more advanced DSA topics such as NP Completeness.

Develop techniques for visualizations that go beyond portraying the dynamics of algorithms to presenting analytical material such as the analysis of the corresponding algorithms.

Expand the interoperability of OpenDSA to work with course management infrastructure such as OpenEdX.

Work with instructors at a range of institutions to deliver OpenDSA materials to their students, and to study how instructors and students can make best use of the OpenDSA materials.

For more information on the OpenDSA project, see the OpenDSA project website. You can check out some sample book instances here. If you are an instructor who is interested in using OpenDSA in your class, you can contact us using the link at the bottom of this page.

We are now hosting AlgoViz on a new VM on our physical server, with an updated operating system, etc. This let us ﬁx some bugs that had temporarily knocked out the AV catalog. We apologize for the interruption! Hopefully everything is running smoothly now. If you see any problems with the site, please contact us.

Our sister project, OpenDSA, has recently received two NSF grants. OpenDSA seeks to to develop a complete online interactive textbook for data structures and algorithms (DSA) courses. Eventually, this will include:

Hundreds of instructional modules, where each module is the equivalent to one topic, such as one sorting algorithm, corresponding to a couple of pages in a standard textbook. Each module is of textbook quality.

Every algorithm or data structure illustrated by an interactive algorithm visualization.

Every module containing multiple interactive assessment activities that give students immediate feedback on their proﬁciency with the material. This means many hundreds of exercises.

Our current funding includes the following grants:

TUES program grant DUE-1139861 supports the collaboration of Virginia Tech, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, and Rice University to develop the prototype system and initial content.

EAGER program grant IIS-1258571 supports the collaboration of University of Wisconsin-Madison, Auburn University, and Virginia Tech to work with Aalto University, Finland.

We recently returned from SIGCSE 2012 in Raleigh, NC where the weather was beautiful and the conference was great! Thank you to all who stopped by the booth to talk about our projects. Most people seemed to be familiar with the site and had used it to look for AVs at some time, a good sign of success. We were able to spread the word about our new OpenDSA project as well.

Thanks also to Boots Cassell of the Ensemble Project, who we shared booth expenses with.

And thanks to Zalia Shams for this photo of members of the AlgoViz and Ensemble teams at our booth!